Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Women at the Wall Attacked by Ultra-Orthodox

The Women at the Wall, a group of Jewish women who have long sought the right to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem along with men, did so for the first time with police protection on Friday. But they were greeted by thousands of yeshiva students — including Haredi girls — who attacked them verbally and physically.

Protests at the Western Wall in Jerusalem opposing the Women of the Wall prayer group ended on Friday morning with the arrest of three haredi men suspected of disturbing the peace, as well as two police officers who suffered light injuries and were treated at the scene. A large number of security forces were at the holy site, attempting to create a human barrier between the men and women’s sections.

Haredi protesters threw water bottles and other objects and shouted insults at the Women of the Wall activists, according to Israel Radio.

Rabbi Susan Silverman, comedian Sarah Silverman’s sister who prays with the Women of the Wall, was at the protest where she said that haredi men spit globs of spit on her three daughters. she told The Jerusalem Post. Silverman also said that the haredim threw coffee at the Women of the Wall activists and that a little girl next to her was hit in the head with something hard.

Now here’s the truly staggering part of all this. The rabbi who oversees the Western Wall says the victims of this violence are to blame for the whole thing:

Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview on Friday that the Women of the Wall organization are forcefully imposing their opinions on others and he begged that they stop.

No, you ass. The only ones “imposing” their opinions are the ones throwing bottles and spitting on other people. Here’s my transcription of part of his statement on video:

To continue and create a situation in which many people and a large crowd that a certain custom stabs their heart, to try and do that on purpose, in front of them, I think it is really inappropriate.

Yeah, just like it was really inappropriate for black people to go and eat at whites-only lunch counters and “stab their hearts” with the presence of people they don’t want there. He forgets, of course, that the only reason there was a large crowd there was that the enemies of equality brought in thousands of protesters to abuse these women.

@robertfisher #5 – So…. pointing out misogyny and the expectations of male religious privilege is indistinguishable from putting people into ghettos then packing them off in cattle cars to be exterminated?

They have a whole big incoherent and rambling book chock full of things to hate. Shellfish, gays, beef stroganoff, four-legged insects, pi, polyester blends, menstruating women, and canaanites are just the beginning.

When you have a book of nonsense that passes itself off as wisdom, the only result will be nonsense.

The thing you have to bear in mind is that robertfisher doesn’t think like normal people.

We think of communication in terms of ideas. Content is determined by context and sentence structure. The location of words in a sentence matter to us because it imbues a purpose for the word within the idea: Subject, direct object, indirect object, etcetera. The ideas being communicated in this post include outrage against the unfairness of arbitrary religiously motivated oppression against a group of people over their sex, outrage at the use of victim-blaming by the oppressors to abdicate responsibility for their own actions, and so forth.

People like robertfisher don’t understand context, nuance, syntax, or grammar. They only think of words as strings of characters, like a computer, not representations of objects, actions, and properties. They connect certain keywords together in superficial correlations, and thus they’re terrible at comprehension.

It’s like advertising services that place ads for psychic consultations on skeptical websites that criticize parapsychology and fortunetelling. robertfisher saw “Jews,” “oppression,” and various “angry” words without looking at their function in sentence structure, the context of civil rights discussions, or, really, anything beyond the presence or absence of those key words. Thus, he assumed the post was anti-Semitic based on word presence and superficial correlation to other words, so he immediately and unthinkingly jumps to a habitual strained Nazi analogy madlib because Nazis are associated with “Jews,” “oppression,” and numerous angry words. He probably doesn’t even know what “Nazi” means, only what strings it’s correlated with.

Yes! Just imagine if there were bussed in protest groups, thrown objects and verbal abuse every time someone decided to wish on a star, perform a cartwheel, skip or jump in the street, hug a tree, smell the grass, stand on a treestump… oh … I forgot… religion.

I caught the end of this CBC radio interview with one of the women from the organization (don’t remember her name, but it wasn’t Susan Silverman) while I was driving.

I was grinding my teeth and white-knuckled on the steering wheel I was so angry, especially when she described a group of Ultra-Orthodox women pulling teenager girls out of school to go shame the women who were praying. What an uplifting opportunity for life lessons on proper female etiquette!

Apparently they told the girls that the Women at the Wall were going specifically to disrupt men’s prayers, which is a particularly infuriating lie.

What I want to know is how many of those supposedly religious women were having their period the day they got all pushy about prayin’ like that, ’cause you SHOULD NOT be HOLYING and prayin’ and shit when you are UNCLEAN!!

OK? Why would these women be asserting their rights in this way when walking away from this stupid shit is better for their health? The women would be much better served yelling “WANKERS!!”* and throwing fake menses at the praying guys.

Raging Bee fails to distinguish between supporting the right of a country to exist and supporting its failure to rein in its idiots. You know, like every other country.

Israel’s existence hasn’t been threatened since 1948 when it became the premier military power in the area. The war of 1948 was an excuse for ethnic cleansing. The Six Day War was a long planned war of conquest. Since 1964 every single Israeli administration forwarded the plan of settling the occupied territories with Jewish citizens. The idiots are running the country and it is the ultra-orthodox Jews who are fighting to block any change in policy.

The Israelis are sure incompetent at ethnic cleansing as there are over 1 million Arabs living in Israel. Their Arab opponents did a much better job as there are almost no Jews left living in Arab countries.

The Six Day War was a long planned war of conquest

Josef Goebbels would be so proud of frankb for his expert use of the Big Lie. I guess that Nasser demanding the removal of UN peacekeeping forces from the Sinai moving 100,000 troops up to the border with Israel and closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping had nothing at all to do with the 6 day war. Not a bit of it, perish the thought.

At the end of the war, the State of Israel kept the area that had been recommended by the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 but also took control of almost 60% of the area allocated to the proposed Arab state

The definition of “ethnic cleansing” does not mean that the whole population is moved.

Demographic changes occurred in the country. Between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the area that became Israel and became Palestinian refugees.

As for Jews being expelled from other countries, when did that start?

The war also marked the beginning of the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim lands. Beginning in 1948, and continuing until 1972, an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 Jews left, fled, or were expelled.

Oh yeah, it started with Israel’s war of ethnic cleansing.
I will stop derailing now.

Officially because it’s a tiny republic surrounded by evil dictatorships with a genocidal bend.
Officiously because rich white guys get a hard-on when they see people of arabic descent behind killed/expulsed/screwed-over with impunity.

***

BTW, are we still pretending that Israel is a secular democracy instead of a fundamentalist Theocracy?

Well, technically, the current government is dominated by nationalistic unbelievers who have a vested interest in pretending that judaism is a coherent self-contained ethnicity. Some decided to call it a hypocritical secular ethnocracy, which is more accurate, but also may make some westerner unconfortable when they realize that turning one’s coutry into a hypocritical secular ethnocracy is part of the platform of a great many powerful political parties in “advanced” western democracies.

Ole frankb continues his Josef Goebbels impersonation. Aside from the fact that Wikipedia is not the most reliable of sources, it should be noted that the nascent Government of Israel accepted the UN partition plan, the surrounding Arab states rejected it and invaded the nascent state. Unfortunately for them, they lost and the consequences of their failed aggression was that much of the Arab side of the partition was also lost. That’s what happens when a war is lost. The winners call the shots.

Don’t believe it, just ask the Government of Mexico in 1846 which lost Arizona and New Mexico as a result of losing the US/Mexican War. Don’t believe it, just ask the Germans who lost Eastern Silesia and Pomerania, after the 2nd World War which made up much of Prussia. Winners keepers, losers weepers. Japan is still trying to get back the Kurile Islands which were occupied by the former Soviet Union at the tail end of the 2nd World War, another consequence of Pearl Harbor.

By the way, most of the Jews who had been living in Arab countries a lot longer then most of the Palestinians had been living in Palestine left quite soon after the 1948 war. Regardless of who left when, the current situation is that the number of Arabs living in Israel (by the way, not all of those Arabs are Palestinians) is greater then it was in 1948 and the number of Jews living in Arab countries is almost non-existent compared to the number living there in 1948.

The secular nationalists that weppe is referring to are the party started by Naftali Bennett, who is about as popular amongst the Haredim as the late Yassir Arafat (they don’t like his admonition to them to join the IDF and get a job). What has happened is a sea change in Israeli politics where, as long as Bennett and Yair Lapid, founder of another new party in the current government, stick together, they call the shots as together they outnumber Bibi’s Likud faction (which includes 8 members of Avigdor Lieberman’s party). If they pull out, Bibi is for the high jump.

I’m sure SLC can help me out here. Didn’t Israel pass laws (or are going to pass) laws to end male/female segregation everywhere in the country (even in ultra-orthodox areas)?
Despite the extremists wanting to keep Israel in the middle ages, the secular forces are dragging it back to the future.
Dingo

I wonder if what set Robert Fisher off was the “Ultra” part of “Ultra-Orthodox” in Ed’s title (i.e. he thought that was anti-Semitic, which led him to a further leap into his “you people are just Nazis” stupidity).

The attitude of the Haredim towards women differs little from the Muslim fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Or from many of the Christian born agains in the US. Dingojack is quite accurate as describing all these folks as still living in the Middle Ages.

Although Israel is far from perfect in the status of women (neither is the US for that matter), I suggest that the folks here read the attached link to a post by freethoughtsblogs blogger Dr. Nasreen relative to happened to her mother. Things are far worse in much of the Muslim world.

Protests at the Western Wall in Jerusalem opposing the Women of the Wall prayer group ended on Friday morning with the arrest of three haredi men suspected of disturbing the peace, as well as two police officers who suffered light injuries and were treated at the scene.

They arrested two Policemen for suffering light injuries? Seems harsh…

So now you idiot Leftist douchebags have descended to the level of Nazis. How appropriate. It’s where you’ve wanted to go all along, huh? Admit it. The mask finally drops.

Hang on, so Leftists are Nazis (who, for robertifher’s benefit, since he is clearly intellectually challenged, were massively to the right) because obviously Nazis were all about protecting Jewish women’s right to the free exercise of religion.